Later today (or possibly one evening this week) - I'll be upgrading to Invision Board 2.3

The board will get switched off - the new content uploaded - and then an upgrade actioned - which should be a few hours at most. If you see the board acting strange during this period - don't email me - and don't try and post to the forum once the upgrade has started until you see this thread updated with news that the upgrade is complete.

In the event of emergency - we have the UMSF lifeboat here : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/unmannedspaceflight/

If the proverbial has hit the fan - I'll post about it there.

Fingers crossed

Doug

The upgrade is basically done - obviously there will need to be some tidying up - logo's etc - but the forum is functional again

Doug

Congratulations - a thing like that takes a lot of courage...but I guess it's not your first time.

You know - the forum's still closed....we could just talk about EVERYONE in here before we open it again Oops....too late

Damn - too late

Doug

Thanks for not providing an anxiety provoking warning of this upgrade, say, oh, about a month ago.


[laugh]

Technically - I sort of did : http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&p=97065 - but I just did it a LOT later than I thought I would back then.

Doug

O.K. Well done Doug... as an Data application admin I know that You should never change/upgrade a running system

No problem. I am fully capable of having a retroactive anxiety attack.


[shudder]

[pulse racing]

[swoon]

Hello Doug,

Glad to see the forum back. For the past 24 hours or so I haven't been receiving any email updates from a topic I'm tracking. Is this something with my email or with the forum?

While I'm here another question. When I send a PM I would think it would appear in the PM "Sent" folder. However that folder is empty. Is this feature working?

BTW I enjoyed hearing you on Planetary Radio recently...

Thanks,

What do these colored figures by the poster's name represent? They seem to be mostly red, gray for some people and occasionally green/blue. Is that online status or something?

P.S. The "Front Page" is disabled, something about admin settings.

I was also wondering about the colored figures, so I tried to go to the "portal" to see who was online. I got a message telling me that "The portal has not been enabled. Please check your Invision Power Board Admin Settings." Perhaps that was intentional, but I thought I'd mention it. Otherwise everything else seems ok.

It's like getting a new version of Office - you suddenly find things that are new, and discover settings that have changed. The portal should be active again now - still got some stuff to figure out and tweak

Doug, I'm not able to upload image attachments with the new version. In the little Attachments sub-window I hit "Browse..." to select the file, and then hit the green "UPLOAD" button. (It says I have used 0 bytes of a 1MB limit.) Then the subwindow clears and displays the message "Uploading File...", but nothing further happens.

Could this be a browser issue? I'm using Mozilla 1.7.10.

Also regarding image attachments, it seems like many of them cannot be viewed without logging in - though this might just be me.

Did you click the manage current attachments arrow above the upload button? You need to click on the + at the left to add the attachment to the post.

I must say that having a "portal" is much more fun for we space aficionados (and sci-fi fans) than a plain old "front page."

The upgraded message editor looks pretty nice. It looks as if we have some new formating options. Hmm, I wonder what it means to insert: Spoiler? That could be fun.

I don't know if this is something you can turn on and off or not, but the new forum is missing a feature I found useful in the previous version. I used to be able to mouse-over image attachments and get a yellow balloon popup with the image file size and number of downloads. That information is missing from the new pages.

I just went to Ted Stryk's Pioneer 11 Saturn post:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...ost&p=99744

...and discovered if I try to click on the link to his posted image:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.p...st&id=11865

...all I get is an error message:

"Sorry, but you do not have permission to use this feature...."

I wasn't logged in. I needed to log in to actually see his picture. Looking around (like the new Iapetus pictures), it seems that no uploaded pictures are visible unless you are logged in. Is this a bug or a new "feature?"

(I would disagree with it being a feature. It discourages casual browsers, and my cut down your audience for outreach.)

Once I hit the upload button, that arrow disappears and never reappears. There's clearly a problem here. Anyone have this work with Mozilla?

Testing with Firefox 2.0.0.6

EDIT: seems to work.

It's a case of some settings from the 2.1.3 version carrying over to 2.3 - and some not. For some reason which is not documented by Invision - the settings for lots of things did carry over - but the ability for guests to download attachments for each forum wasn't one of them. I've gone through each forum and added guest-download for attachments.

As for the problem with attachments. Safari and Camino - no problem here.

The file size is reported with the thumbnail - but the number of downloads...have to see if that another magic setting that's moved or been changed with the upgrade.

Doug

Email's are currently broken (got to work that one out yet ) so subscriptions will probably not get notifications, and sending emails to members from their profiles will probably not work either. That'll have to wait till tonight.

Doug

Can't see that with IE6.0. What I get is an yellow box saying "Attached image" and that's all.

Insert worlds largest shrug icon here >

I see it with Firefox, Safari and Camino.

Doug

Email issue seemingly resolved (just sent myself an email from my profile - and subscriptions etc should work the same way)

Doug

It never did work for me with IE, even before the upgrade. When I was at work and forced to use IE I would have to open the page's html source and search for the information in there.

To be fair, I don't remember either seeing that info before the upgrade.

Just for comparison - this is how I see the forum through Safari and Camino.

Yup. Now I'm seeing this same "new look".
It's nice to have the attachment's filesize somewhere, specially for those (like me at home) with dial-up connections.

Doug, I agree with the sentiment, but since plenty of other web developers are of the opposite persuasion, I wonder if you've installed the "IE Tab" plugin for firefox? Sounds like you might be on an Apple box, though.

The IE tab is wonderful, though. Just this morning I had to use it to read the last few characters of text on some borked webpage. It was probably screwed up by Adblock, but it's definitely nice to have the second rendering engine in the same UI. And you could have changed your post to "Yeah, I don't see it on IE... shrug."

Working just fine once name & password entered and ...this looks like an upgrade.

I tried it with IE7 on my work rig - no problem there at that time either - but because I was posting from my Mac, I couldn't drag a screenie over.

I think there was some sort of cached thing going on - because the admin section was looking rather broken - but at the same time Tesh said 'oo - works now' - the admin section started looking normal as well

(Although I do use one local cinema instead of another because one chains website doesn't work in anything other than IE )

And while I've tried to make this as easy a change as possible by keeping the legacy 2.1 theme - I'll be switching to the 2.3 theme ( with a new logo) to tie in with the Sputnik anniv

Doug

If we're talking about the hover box ( the title element that is contained in the link tag <A href="blah" title="safari.gif - Size: 25.72K, Downloads: 20" > ) then running under XP and on the UMSF I never saw it with Firefox (any version) or Safari but I did see it with IE6 (definitely) and IE7 (I think).

Since the upgrade I still don't see it with Firefox and Safari and definitely don't see it with IE7 now, so maybe my meory of it working with IE7 is faulty. The title element is still present in the page source so this should work.

It's not a biggie for me though.

Works great here on IE6/Win2000. I see only one issue on the new version: the lack of alt-text on the emoticons when replying (they had alt-text previously) - now I have to right-click "show picture" on each one to find the one I want.

I'm only noticing one difference in how the new software runs vs. the old software. It seems to take from three to ten times longer for a post to upload and appear now than it did before the upgrade.

I've noticed this from the moment I first made a post this morning, and it still holds true. Even a short post takes 20 to 30 seconds to upload, and a longer post (say seven or eight paragraphs) can take up to two minutes.

Every other operation seems to be very quick and smooth, or else I'd chalk it up to bad connections between here and the servers on the other side of the pond (as happens often enough). But since the rest of the forum operations are as fast as I've ever seen them, I just can't buy that explanation anymore.

It's definitely taking a significantly longer time for posts to actually post. It doesn't bother me overmuch, but it's the one big thing I've noticed in terms of performance.

-the other Doug

Odd- because the one thing the in the version tracker banged on about was the improved performance.

Doug

I noticed the slow upload last night but thought it was just me. Testing again with a low latency\high bandwidth link.

Edited: No delays in posting from here at the moment. I'll test it again this evening from home and see if it was just a transient issue.

It's probably a bit slower - but 2-3 minutes? That's too long. I'll do some searching.

Doug

Old bug, new bug

Old: When I brouse, I click on "view new posts", then hit the too-damn-small-active-area red boxes by the thread title. The software updates the boxes erratically on it's own, but it I hit "view new posts" again, it corrects all of the ones I've looked at to the has-been-viewed status.

If I leave the board and come back 10 min or 50 min <or something> later, ALL the boxes are red again and it shows the same threads, whether I've viewed them or not. If I click on a re-reddened box of a thread, it DOES go to the last thing I looked at or the end of the thread, but it's not passing that information correctly "up to higher levels"

New bug: I was a "guest" again and had to log in tonight, even though I have "remember my password" checked in the login box, and it's worked the last few nights.

Well -view new posts has never been a reliable way of checking up. It's useful, but keeps non-new stuff onboard for some time. I think it's possibly a symptom of tabbed browsers.

Retained login issue- are you going to www.umsf not just umsf each time? That cured it for most people last time around.

I'm not a code-monkey, I really am just a user of Invision, and as such much of the criticism about it, there's nothing I can do.

I Just had to log in again this morning as well. Using the same www.unman... as I always have.

I've never had much of a problem with 'view new posts': open them all in new tabs then click 'mark all posts as read and return to index'.

James

EDIT: No delay in getting this post posted - very quick.

Good good

And what about skinning the forum. The default IPB skin have not a good looking for me... I.eg. before subsection of forums, is it possible to have the UMSF spacecraft or thing like this? More generaly, a skin with more links to spaceflight without humans .

Posting is now back to the normal speed. Must have been a first-day glitch, maybe something to do with how Invision was updating the databases. But it's smoothed out now.

As for changing the default skin, can we have a chance to at least take a look at the choices, like last time? I've gotten used to this skin, and wouldn't care for anything that's more garish.

-the other Doug

The new skin will be the default, with this old one as an option if people choose it - I'll do sneak-peak's closer to the time

Doug

OK, cool. I like the option of choosing, is all.

As for posting times, I'm beginning to wonder if it might not be a forum-specific thing. It just took 50 seconds for a post to the Icy Moons forum (the poll topic, Iapetus black-on-white or white-on-black) to post, and then adding my vote in that poll took 40 seconds. But posting on this forum takes a second or two only.

Perhaps there is some board-specific setting that is checking for virii and such on some boards, but not on others?

-the other Doug

I'll just comment that the upgrade has fixed what has been the most annoying thing about visiting UMSF for me: Stupid IE couldn't remember my password when I came in to the site at "www.unmannedspaceflight.com," only when I went to the login screen. Now IE remembers my password.

As far as I'm concerned, the upgrade is a success.

(Though I have also been noticing the slow-posting problem some others have mentioned; I haven't seen a pattern to it yet, I'll post again if I do.)

--Emily

I too am having to log in more than i used to.... perhaps I should delete my cookies and rebookmark the View New posts link? It used to just go to the list with a saved password.... now I have had to enter the password a few times in the last day.

Is there a default log in expiration that got set in the upgrade? Do we time out more quickly?

Haven't noticed any "slowing" that others have mentioned.

ch*nked. (*="u")

Still crashes. Must be a feature .....

-Mike

3600s

Doug

I had to log in 7 times to get to this point of sending a mesage. I get dropped out of my sign in each time I change pages. I sign in to http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com.